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Figure it out yourself

In this blog, Guy Kawasaki writes about 10 (real world) things college students ought to learn. He has raised some very good points that are not taught in school but are extremely important at work.

In point #4 he says:

How to figure out anything on your own. Armed with Google, PDFs of manuals, and self-reliance, force yourself to learn how to figure out just about anything on your own. There are no office hours, no teaching assistants, and study groups in the real world. Actually, the real world is one long, often lonely independent study, so get with it. Here’s a question to test your research prowess. How do you update the calendar in a Motorola Q phone with appointments stored in Now-Up-To-Date? (I’ll send a copy of The Art of the Start to the first person with a good answer.)

This brings to mind ideas that I have been trying to talk about for a while: self learning, informal learning, and continuous learning. I would again like to take this opportunity to remind you of the importance of learning continuously. Sometimes there are things that have to be learned because the need just came up, but most often it helps to have a plan. In my next blog I will write about how to make such a plan... so stay tuned :-)



Notes: This text was originally posted on my earlier blog at http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net
Here are the comments from the original post


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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Sachin More
URL:
DATE: 08/24/2006 07:30:53 AM
I would like to add one more line from the same blog...

The purpose of learning is "not to" prepare for working but to prepare for living(This is what I personally belive in). Working is a part of living, and it requires these kinds of skills no matter what career you pursue.

However, "there is much more to life than work".
Why do we forget this?



COMMENT:

AUTHOR: Tarun Chandel

URL: http://tarunchandel.blogspot.com

DATE: 10/19/2006 10:07:15 AM

I had a chance to meet Guy at IBM Software Universe in Mumbai recently. Guy is very cool person and loves to live life. He is fun to talk to. He is VC by profession and has missed chance to invest in companies like Google, Yahoo. He is a very experienced man and just 5 minutes of talk with him can leave you charged and inspired to follow your dreams.

Coming back to the current post I think life teaches us a lot of lessons and if we keep our eyes open and keep looking for information, there is more than enough information avilable around us. I think the most important ability to have in today's world is to have ability to learn, learnability. Learn new things, make sense of things changing around you, ask right questions and find answers to those questions based of facts.



COMMENT:

AUTHOR: Parag

DATE: 10/19/2006 12:28:22 PM

That's a good point Tarun... make sense of things around you and ask the right questions. The right questions will usually lead to the right answers.

The ability to find connections between seemingly unrelated areas is also very important. it helps in broadening a persons perspective and find ingenuine solutions to problems.

--
Parag

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